Hello,
I believe I have yellow jackets living in an exterior wall of my home. I can see their entrance point from the outside. It is a small hole in the mortar of our brick house. The past 4 days, they have somehow found their way to the inside of the house. Ugh...I really hate yellow jackets!!! They are always in the same place...on the door window of our basement stair landing. It is a landing we use all day long, so it's nothing we can avoid. Their entrance hole is just outside of this door, about 2 inches above the driveway which butts up to the house.
Now, I have been spraying their entrance hole for the past 3 nights with both Raid (first night) and Orkin (last 2 nights). I like the Orkin because it foams up and would seem to get in their nest better. The yellow jackets continue to get inside our house, although most of them are very near death leading me to believe they're coming from the Orkin soaked nest. I have been reading that it's not good to treat the outside entrance point because it will drive them further into the house as they try to get away. Is this so? What can a girl do?? I want to call an exterminator and my husband says we should just spray the hole and fill it in with cement. He thinks I'm overreacting. Won't that just trap the still living ones in our house?? Help please!!
Ann

 

Dust the hole daily with rotenone or sevin garden dust. They will track that back to the nest and kill them.

 

Is this something I can pick up at Lowe's or HD? Thanks for the reply!

 

Yes it is. I think every hardware store on earth carries one or the other.

 

Rotenone is becoming harder to find.Sevin,however,is a mainstay of almost any garden dept. anywhere.It is also available in liquid form both concentrate and spray but the dust form might work better for you.The label will say absolutely nothing about using it for this purpose.Do not be stopped by that.

 

I just went through this same deal. I hit them twice from the outside with Ortho wasp spray and then dusted the opening with sevin. A few found their way into the house but were either dead or almost dead by that time. Now I gotta caulk the openings.

 

How long does that usually take? A couple days, a week or two?

we have a nest between the foundation and drywall..we just dusted both openings with sevin at dusk, we plan on dusting it again after the katrina rain comes..

 

For us, it only took one day. The exterminator dusted the opening outside and the opening they were using inside the house. After that, only 2 more made it inside the house that day and they were almost dead when they crawled out. That has been it for those yellow jackets. Good luck!

 

I checked this morning and i barely saw any yellowjackets coming out.. then i checked again and now i see that they have found another crack to sneak out thru ... :sigh: i have to get daddy dearest to dust that for me as soon as the rain stops and perhaps i'll buy more dust to dust the entire base of the foundation in case they find another way out..